8 Films Where Not Giving A F**k Improved Everything

Sooner or later, every long-running franchise starts to get a little boring and stale. A lot of franchises just end there, some limp on and extort every available penny (*cough* Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow), and some say “what the hell” and just go completely insane. Strangely, this last option often results in an amazing film.

Final Destination 5 is a good example of this. For a movie where Death itself is the main villain, the series was becoming way too serious and bogged down in the melodrama, so with part 5 the producers decided to go back to the roots of the series and go completely insane. That’s why we got death by laser eye surgery, belt sander and – I’m honestly being serious here – Buddha statue. A sequel has to do the unenviable job of making something as good as (if not better than) the original, whilst also keeping the series fresh and giving the fans more of what they want. Producers have to be careful that they don’t repeat themselves by making the exact same film again (see Hangover 2) but they also can’t change too much or they risk alienating the audience (RoboCop 3). It’s a very fine balancing act.

However, there is another way. You could just make something completely mad and slap the title on it, using the luxury of already established characters to make a story that wouldn’t ordinarily get made. Here’s 8 films that did just that…

3rd Year Film and Television Production student at Edge Hill University. Writer of "Stockton's Last Stand" and screenwriter/director of "Hunted" and "Spyfail 2: The Search for Spyfail 1".
I also do stand-up comedy sometimes... I'm told I'm marginally funny.

Discussion

20 Comments

Moonraker is brilliant, so is The Lost World. And I genuinely enjoyed Kick-Ass 2. I think you might be missing the point of the article, which is where sequels could’ve been terrible but by not really caring they actually turned out pretty awesome.

Kickass 2 was universally panned. It removed everything that was good about the first film and the result was a rather mean spirited affair.

The Lost World was atrocious. Vince Vaughn’s character was ludicrous, the entire climax made absolutely no sense whatsoever, appearing to be a late inclusion (which was exactly what it was) and with one the worst child actor moments in the history of cinema (the little black girl with her high school gymnastics taking out a Raptor).

And Moonraker is in the running to be the worst Roger Moore Bond film. Which is quite some achievement. It can be best summed up with Jaws’ comically bad “love story”. Moonraker was a cynical attempt by the Bond franchise to cash in on the Star Wars craze. And it showed.

I agree that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was a great sequel, and it did have a who-gives-a-flying-f**k attitude about it. But I do not agree that it is better than Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is hailed by many critics as the most perfectly balanced movie ever made. Not the greatest! Just a film where everything clicks together perfectly.

The Last Crusade was a tad disjointed in some parts too, like the Venice library leading into the sewer-on-fire leading into the boat chase scene. Huh?! Not to mention some of the silly stuff, like the book burning Nazi parade, or Hitler signing autographs, or motorcycle jousting with a Nazi flag, or a green screen flying zeppelin, etc.

In some regards I prefer Last Crusade to Raiders, I think mainly because of Harrison Ford being more comfortable in the role, and we don’t need to be introduced to Indy’s story, which takes up a lot of the first film.

That’s not to say Raiders is worse than Last Crusade, I think they’re both brilliant. Raiders may edge slightly ahead with its more cohesive narrative but for pure fun you have to give Last Crusade the advantage I think.

This I agree with. They did seem to have more fun with The Last Crusade than they did with Raiders. The Nazis as an enemy were a bit more comical in Last Crusade than they were in Raiders, where they were utter badasses aside from being rather dumb.

I don’t think Moonraker is brilliant (a word I think we use a little too liberally with film) but all in all it’s really not that bad. I’ll take it over about half of the Bond films.

However, and I don’t mean to beat a dead horse here, but the Lost World and Kick Ass 2 are both terrible. Lost World mostly for being boring and corny and cheesy. I mean, come on, fighting a raptor with gymnastics? It does have a few redeemable things about it though.

But KA2 is especially bad. I’ll go as far as to say that it is one of the absolute worst movies I have ever seen. It tries to be funny, but the humor never works. It tries to be tragic, but that too doesn’t work. Why should I care about Dave’s father sacrificing himself to protect Dave’s identity when Dave’s whole motivation is “it makes me feel cool”? Seriously, the protagonist is terrible at being a hero, causing all this death and destruction, and for what? So he can feel cool? Get outta here. And not only is the character unaware of this but the movie is too. The final shot (which isnt ironic) is of Dave’s new mask and its supposed to pump us up, why? So this moron can run around the city getting more people killed in his quest to feel cool? Ugh. It’d be like if I bought a pistol, then immediately accidentally shot 5 people, but obe of thm happens to be a drug dealer, so what do I do? I go out and “heroically” buy a shotgun. What a stupid, awful film. I usually don’t care how movies do at the box office, but I’m so glad this piece of garbage bombed.

I won’t address all your points as I’ve already explained my reasoning above, but just to correct you – Kick-Ass 2 made $60mil on a $28mil budget (including marketing) so not a bomb by any stretch of the imagination.

$28M did not include the marketing or distribution, it was the raw budget. And while it may have squeaked out a small profit overseas, it opened domestically at 5th, behind 3 movies already in their second weekend. Studios do not invest $28M to make a $2-3M profit. Bomb may have been tge wrong word, but it was far from a success.

Kick-Ass 2? No, that was not going balls to the wall. The comics went much further, the first movie went further. KA2 was boring, and staid, in comparison with KA1. Imagine what it could have been, how they could have gone all-in on it, and then see what they did with it.

let it roll off your shoulders man….i disagreed with somethings too(moonraker)…but the point of the article was solid….so…9/10 sequels being “surprisingly enjoyable” is pretty good..considering the whole focus was on risk taking….and i did enjoy both kickasses for completely different reasons…the article was meant for fun but people are too serious